luametatex

About luametatex

From Debian's package description

The LuaMetaTeX program is a light weight variant of LuaTeX. This program finds its origin in parts of TeX (the original program, eTeX (some extensions), pdfTeX (more extensions) Aleph (based on Omega, directions) and of course LuaTeX (lots of things).

This is a follow up on the LuaTeX project. The source is considered part of the ConTeXt distribution and managed by the ConTeXt development team and the ConTeXt user group. That way it can be guaranteed that the engine and this TeX macro package work together as expected. The idea is that users can easily compile the source themselves and that way have a guaranteed long term (minimal) TeX based installation. Because the management scripts are in Lua, only one binary is needed to serve the ConTeXt distribution.

In the source code it was tried to stay close to the ancestors, LuaTeX, pdfTeX, eTeX and TeX, but in the meantime due to additions there is quite some diverge. There are new primitives and submechanisms, there is more control over the inner workings, font handling is mostly delegated to Lua and there is no built-in backend. The code base is all-inclusive and has no (nor will have) dependencies on external libraries. Performance and memory consumption have been optimized and the additions (compared to LuaTeX) don’t have a negative impact.

From Debian's description of the luametatex package, under that package's license.